“Ghost Editor” is a well-dramatized biography of Roscoe Dunjee, who founded the Black Dispatch, the first African American newspaper in 1915 Oklahoma City.

Actor Fred Pinkard narrates the series as Dunjee in this episode of the “Destination Freedom” African American history series, which was created by journalist Richard Durham at WMAQ in Chicago in 1948-50. (Remarkably, that was also the station that introduced the long-running African-American dialect comedy hit “Amos and Andy,” started by two white actors.)

As the episode title suggests, Dunjee began working as a ghostwriter, going back and forth between white papers and a previous black paper in Tulsa — until it was blown up while campaigning against a voter suppression bill.

In a particularly dramatic scene, Dunjee fights off a group of assailants, with a last-minute assist from some oilfield workers. “The Klan’s against some of us too,” a big red-haired worker with an Irish accent tells the editor, which helps convince him not to leave Oklahoma.

In another scene, a federal agent encourages Dunjee to go undercover to investigate a Texas lynching — a dangerous reporting technique. But he manages to get key evidence by impersonating the brother of the hanged man, and letting a key figure in the lynching leap to the conclusion that he had the right to sell the murdered man’s land.

Obviously a 30-minute radio drama had to pick and choose action scenes to tell a life story, and may have taken poetic liberties, but I have not read Dunjee’s biography (beyond, I will admit, Wikipedia) to see how close the script came to real events. My project here is just to explore how journalists were portrayed in radio dramas, and this episode does make its points about the editor’s independence, initiative and courage.

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About Bob Stepno

mild-mannered reporter who fell deeper into computers and the Web during three trips through graduate school in the 1980s and 1990s, then began teaching journalism, media studies and Web production, most recently as a faculty member at Radford University.